Lost Like Children
by waywardbard
Summary: Ben Braeden is full of holes, and only Claire Novak can fill them.


i.

They move to Arcadia after coming home from the hospital, and live with Aunt Marie while Lisa looks for a job, then saves up for a deposit on a house. They share a hideabed in the basement. It's the first time he's shared a bed with his mother since he was a kid, but Ben hugs her so tightly the first few nights that his arms are sore when he wakes up in the morning.

She could have died. That's what he tells himself, over and over, watching the rise and fall of her chest as she sleeps.

_Take care of your mom._

What would have happened if she'd died? Would he have come to Arcadia, anyway? His mind feels full of holes. Matt was dead, and their house was a wreck. All of it was bad, but something else was wrong. He has nightmares of a man with a gun and his mother screaming, blood dripping from her lips and her skin cold, and he hugs her tighter.

_Take care of your mom._ As though he hadn't been taking care of her for as long as he could remember. She'd had a long string of boyfriends, but none of them mattered as much as he did. He would always be there for her. 

ii.

At least it's freshman year. There are always new people in freshman year, as all the grade schools pool together into two or three high schools in any city or district. He doesn't stand out. It makes things that much easier to sit in the desk closest to the door and run out before anyone talks to him. He eats his lunch outside, tucked against a tree in the courtyard. He keeps his head down. He manages to keep as under the radar as possible. It's because he's under it that he notices her.

She's a kindred spirit. That much is obvious. She tries to stay in the background just as much, wearing hoodies and hunching over in her chairs. The problem is that the minute she's alone, she lets her guard down. Her hair is like spun sunlight. It makes him ill to know that the words formed in his head – they sound like trashy romance novella crap – but it doesn't make it any less true. She's beautiful. Like an angel. Her eyes lift out of her book once, her expression pulled in a frown, and suddenly they're looking at each other. Into each other. His face heats with guilt and he stands rapidly, gathers his things, and runs back inside, but her face is burned into the back of his eyelids. His eyes refuse to adjust to the lack of her light.

iii.

She has three classes with him, and shares his lunch period. When she gets bored from the lectures, she writes in a dark blue moleskin notebook. Her voice is clear – albeit reluctant – when she's called on to answer questions.

Claire Novak. A couple students whisper things about how she's crazy, about how her dad left her mom, about how she has a tattoo on her chest. Ben doesn't care. He watches her, and he waits, and one day he leaves her a bottle of the soda she likes and a bag of tropical Skittles by the place she always sits, with a sticky note bearing her name. The following afternoon, he finds a Snickers and Dr. Pepper. By Monday, they are sitting next to each other in class and meeting up between all the ones they don't share. When next semester starts, they're in every single class together but two: auto shop (him) and choir (her). 

iv.

Amelia and Lisa are just as quick at becoming friends as their children. Ben is glad, because it means he gets to see Claire every day and doesn't have to sneak out or go behind his mother's back. They build trust on their mothers' backs, to the point that they're allowed to go to the movies and downtown by themselves without being supervised. Sometimes they just walk together for hours. He's completely comfortable around her, and she is always smiling around him.

Claire gets asked out by another classmate to a dance two weeks into April. Ben knows, because he's watched the other boy watching them, waiting for a moment when they weren't shoulder to shoulder. It's when he has to go to the bathroom after lunch. Claire wrings her hands and asks him what she should do. It takes all his energy not to tell her everything he's been keeping to himself since the night they both fell asleep watching _The Hobbit_ where he woke up to find her curled against him with her cheek on his chest. That she's the only person he feels he can relate to, the only one he wants to be around. He smiles and tells her she should listen to her gut, because sometimes the heart lies, but the gut is never wrong. When she goes home, he gets on the treadmill, then runs until his legs give out and he can barely walk the next day. She doesn't go to the dance, and they watch _Disney's Prom_ with the mute button on, making up the dialogue as they go.

When she falls asleep on the couch, he counts her eyelashes and tells her he loves her. He wakes up on the floor in the morning with her body curled around his.

v.

Claire doesn't show up at school for three days, and Ben skips out when the lunch bell rings, bikes over to her house as fast as he can just to make sure she's still there. Amelia's car is in the driveway. He knocks, and Amelia answers, but her eyes are bloodshot. Something's wrong, but she doesn't tell him. She drives him back to school, and won't let him see Claire.

He calls Claire four times, but she doesn't answer the house phone or her cell. He bikes over and climbs through her window, finds her curled up in a ball on her bed and crying so hard no sound comes out. Holding her doesn't make her stop; if anything, she just holds on harder and her whole body shakes with the sobs.

So he kisses her. Maybe it's the wrong move. Maybe it's selfish. But then she kisses him back, and he can taste the salt in her mouth, and her body is _so warm_ pressed against his. He can't tell if she's crying because it hurts when they close the final gap between their bodies, but when he tries to pull away she holds on so tightly he can feel her nails cutting into his arm, taste blood in his mouth when she kisses him. She makes him promise he'll never leave her, and he does without thinking. He doesn't need to think; he knows there's nothing in the world that will tear him away from her side. 

vi.

It takes almost a week before she finally tells him everything. About her dad. About angels, and demons, and the two men in the black Chevy Impala. Sam and Dean. The names sound so familiar, like the names of capital cities that he was supposed to memorize in grade school, or how many cups are in a pint; things he knows he should have learned, but hasn't. She tells him about salt and iron, and then she starts speaking in Latin, draws out the symbols, but Ben stops her. His eyes close, and he takes the chalk, and his body knows the words, knows the movements. It doesn't make sense, that he has these memories. She looks at him with a faraway gaze, her hands taking his face.

He knows other things, too. He knows he shouldn't, and it scares him. Claire just sits there, looking _into_ him with those crazy-deep amazing blue eyes she has, while be babbles without stopping.

_Sam and Dean. Sam and Dean. SamandDean._

The nightmares come back that night for the first time in months and he wakes up with a scream, but she's there next to him, holding on tightly and stroking his hair until he falls back asleep again.

vii.

It finally makes sense why he's never known his father. Sometimes hunters are thanked by the ones they save. Sometimes they get swept up in that gratitude and don't pay attention to the little details like _are you on the pill_ or _I have to leave in the morning. _Reverse Cinderella stories. Except sometimes the glass slipper isn't a slipper, it's a baby.

Or something. Ben's never been good about understanding things like that. But it makes sense now. His dad must have been a hunter. He has distant memories of a birthday party when he was a kid, of seeing a man hanging around his mom. There's a scar on the back of his neck, shaped like a circle, that he's had for years but never remembers having gotten. Everything's hazy. The holes in his mind ache.

Demons don't possess kids. Or at least, that's what Claire deduces. If they did, he'd have memories of killing people, and he doesn't. But one day in class, dazed out and staring out the window as their math teacher is going on about the Pythagorean theorem, he remembers being in a hospital, and a man in a trench coat.

When he tells Claire, she goes as white as a sheet. He looks into her eyes, confused, and suddenly that comes back to him, too.

Crazy-deep blue eyes, the same color as Claire's.

_His name is Castiel__,_ she says. _And he's wearing my dad's face._

viii.

They tell their moms that it's a road trip. They'll be back at the end of summer. Amelia buys them a full-sized spare tire, and a AAA-membership. She gets them a battery-jumper too, the kind that plugs into the wall, just in case they're in the middle of nowhere and there aren't any cars around. Lisa puts a MasterCard into his wallet and tells him to use it, and not to be stupid. They fill the trunk with two dufflebags full of clothes, a new gas can, three 24-packs of bottled water, two 12-packs of toilet paper, and an emergency kit. _Just to be safe__,_ Lisa says.

Ben can see the fear in Amelia's eyes. Like they might never come back. Claire cries silently the whole time, and hugs her mother so hard Ben can swear he hears their bones cracking. He looks down at his mother - he's so much taller than her now, and it's always weird when he realizes it - and she has a dazed sort of look. He wonders if she knows, but he doesn't ask. If she doesn't, she's bound to learn it in the time that they're gone. And who knows, maybe they _won't_ come back.

They've made a promise not to stop until they've found him. Whatever it takes. Ben has no idea what will happen if they ever do, but he'll follow Claire to the end of the earth and straight off of it, he doesn't care. He loves her with everything he is.

It isn't just about Claire, though. A lot of it is, there's no denying that, but maybe... maybe if they find Castiel, maybe the holes in Ben's mind will finally be filled, and the nightmares will go away.

ix.

Somewhere along the way, they've stopped being high school kids and started killing monsters. There's a surprising number of them, and it's terrifying, but when they're in the thick of a hunt, everything sort of melts away. For the first time in his life, Ben feels like this is who he was always supposed to be. With Claire at his back, he feels invincible. He isn't of course, and he comes to that horrifying conclusion when he gets possessed somewhere in Des Moines. Bits and pieces reach him through the thick, black fog in his mind, but mostly the thing - demon - just taunts him, and laughs.

_The little boy that Daddy forgot,_ it says. _Left you and your mom all on your lonesome, and didn't even care if it meant you died. He didn't_ want_ to know. You were a mistake, so he took himself from you and ran away with his tail between his legs. _

Ben screams and screams and screams, but it just comes out as laughter. When the smog clears, Claire is stroking his face, her eyes bloodshot from crying, apologies pouring out of her like a running faucet. His body aches in a hundred different places, and he asks her in a small voice to untie him, that it's safe now. As soon as his broken ribs heal, he gets a matching tattoo on his chest.

_The little boy that Daddy forgot. _Nothing - not even the black-label whiskey they manage to hock from the weapons dealer in North Platts, Nebraska - drowns the words out. He pukes his guts out in the toilet while Claire holds back his hair, trying to soothe him, but he just leans his forehead against the porcelain, numb and tired. For the smallest, briefest moment, he wishes he'd never met her. Then he spends the whole night trying to burn away the shame, losing himself in her skin and her scent and her eyes. 

x.

They're in a pawn shop in Colorado, looking for silver to melt down into bullets. There's rumors about a werewolf in Severance, and they want to be prepared for it. Their last weapons dealer was extremely reluctant to sell to them. _You're kids,_ he'd said. _You can still turn back. Get out of this life, before it takes yours. _But he didn't understand. Ben casts his eyes over to where Claire is sorting through a box of rings, checking the labels. They understand each other. Weeks of no results is incredibly disheartening. They hunt to pass the time between searching for their fathers, because if they don't they'll both go crazy.

Turning back, Ben suddenly stops in front of a display case. Among the long line-up of tacky costume jewelry and pendants, there's one lone piece that stands out. It looks completely out of place. His pulse seems to double, and he asks the clerk to see it.

When it falls into his palm, his skin feels warmer. There's a sound in his head, like a whistling, or a buzz after a sudden loud noise. It feels like he's underwater. His eyes follow the curve of the horns, trail down to the double-lobed ears, up the chin to the raised spiral on its forehead. He remembers looking up at it, past it, into a man's face.

_Take care of your mom._

Claire's voice pierces through the white noise and his eyes refocus on her, then on the clerk. He takes out a wad of cash, shoves it in the clerk's hand, then slides the rope chain over his neck. The weight of the amulet falls against his chest and he _remembers this_. Like everything else that doesn't make sense, he remembers.

_Logansport,_ he says. Claire looks at him with a confused expression. _Logansport, Indiana._

_But what about the werewolf? _Claire asks him.

_We'll pass it on to that hunter chick in Colby. C'mon._

Deep down in his bones, he knows that's where they'll find a clue.


End file.
